We stopped talking about diversity, and did something about it

In just six months we have greatly improved the gender balance at Unacast, now at 36% women and 64% men. How did we do this? The answer is as easy to communicate as it is hard to do: We wanted to improve, and we worked hard to do so.

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But let’s rewind back to six months ago, to the moment we realized we had failed. And decided – now, let’s do better.

As I stood in our meeting room looking out over New York City earlier this year in March, I had to exchange binoculars for mirrors, take a long, hard look at ourselves, and painfully admit we had failed at diversity. We were mostly male, mostly white, approximately the same age, the same cultural background, the same. Thomas and I have xeroxed ourselves twenty times over. We had failed at diversity.

From our vantage point, we quickly agreed at a company level that we had to expand our horizon, as we strongly believe we will be the most successful as a company if we are able to ask as many questions as possible, and we achieve that by having a company that mirrors the outside world as best we can.

And, to be interesting to the outside world, we must embody and communicate a culture that is interesting to the world at large. This is where our process started.

Even though diversity is a multifaceted topic that involves gender, background, geography, ethnicity, and more, we concluded that we had to chip away at the diversity block one dent at a time, and focused first on gender balance.

Worth mentioning here is that mirroring the world is an ideal we strive for. It’s a moving target we might perhaps never hit square in the middle, but a target we will nonetheless keep shooting at.

Taking stock of the numbers

In March we were 0% women in engineering and 17% women in total. Now, six months later, we are 31% women in engineering, and 36% women in total. Even though we are not aiming for specific numbers and always hire the most talented person for the job, the numbers above are our actual scorecard and an effect of being an attractive company to whole of the outside world - and not only to half of it.

And we’re just starting. So, how did we do it? It’s was both easy, and hard. We wanted to. We worked hard.

There was, of course, several steps for us to climb to this realization, and many of these steps can be found in the blog section at unacast.com, as we early on decided that we needed to tell everyone what we were doing. To educate, but also to hold ourselves accountable to our own ambitions.

So here’s a step-by-step summary of our dummies guide to diversity:

Realize that we had a diversity deficit

Internal discussions on why this was, and how to fix it

Nothing happened but talk, and more talk

New internal discussions on why this was, and how to fix it

Create a team to actively focus on diversity and the upcoming hiring process. This team was backed by the entire company, the management team, and the founders, under the notion that improved gender balance was critical to our future success

Agree it was ok to take slightly longer to hire in order to improve diversity, since we would never settle for anything less than the top talents

Work hard

Learn and iterate

Work harder

As a consequence of the steps above, more and more women apply to jobs at Unacast and hire by hire we increase the amount of women working at Unacast to 36% - more than doubling the percentage in under six months

These 15 steps are simplified, and we’ll share more detailed descriptions of how we work with diversity at a later stage to expand on some of the more crucial steps above. In addition, we’ll, of course, continue to share our progress and process in general. Because even though we are happy we’ve improved on our gender balance ratio, and in engineering specifically, we admit that we still have work to do e.g. in the management team and on the board.

On that note, I’ll repeat myself from earlier in the post: It’s a moving target we might perhaps never hit square in the middle, but a target we will nonetheless keep aiming for.

Let’s stop the empty gestures

I’ll leave you with this insightful and to-the-point article from Forbes about how to stop the empty gestures and starting creating an action plan to increase the amount of women in IT.